TikTok: The Platform Driving App Success in Türkiye's Dynamic Digital Market

A new meta-analysis conducted by TikTok in collaboration with Adjust (Mobile Measurement Partner) provides the answer. Analyzing data throughout 2024, this study reveals that TikTok consistently outperforms other paid media channels in driving app growth across Türkiye. From assisted installs to cost efficiency, TikTok proves to be more than just an entertainment platform - it's a powerful performance marketing channel. Whether you're launching a fintech app, scaling an e-commerce platform, or growing an entertainment service, TikTok's unique ability to capture attention and drive action makes it essential for app marketers operating in Türkiye. This meta-analysis offers concrete evidence of TikTok's performance advantage in one of the region's most competitive app markets.

The numbers tell a clear story that TikTok is a critical touchpoint in the user decision-making process. Compared to other major platforms, TikTok delivers a higher assisted install rate (+45% vs other paid media*, +220% vs paid social), underscoring its importance in influencing consumer choices. This makes TikTok not just a simple marketing channel, but a key player in how users discover and commit to new apps.

But discovery is only the beginning. Users who come to your app through TikTok arrive at a lower cost: TikTok's cost per install (CPI) is 23% lower than the average for other paid social channels in Türkiye. Simply put, TikTok ads are more efficient at reaching people who will actually download your app.

And these users don't just download and disappear - they stay engaged. Users arriving from TikTok spend 33% more time in apps compared to those from other paid channels and 64% more time than those from paid social, demonstrating deeper engagement with your product.

They're also more valuable. The average revenue generated per user who reached your app through TikTok advertising is 7% higher than users from other paid platforms and 201% higher than users from paid social in Türkiye - proving that TikTok doesn't just drive volume, it drives quality.

TikTok's Edge During Ramadan: Türkiye's Peak Shopping Season

Ramadan represents one of the most critical periods for app marketers in Türkiye - a time when consumer spending surges and engagement with shopping, food delivery, and entertainment apps reaches its annual peak. During this high-stakes season, TikTok's performance advantage becomes even more pronounced.

Users who discovered apps through TikTok spent 33% more time in those apps compared to users from other paid media channels. This extended engagement translates directly to the bottom line. The data from Ramadan 2024 tells a compelling story: users who discovered apps through TikTok spent 61% higher revenue during Ramadan compared to users from other paid media and 67% higher vs paid social.

In a season where every brand is competing for attention and wallet share, TikTok delivers users who are not just browsing - they're actively engaging and spending. For app marketers planning their Ramadan 2025 strategies, these insights make TikTok an essential component of any peak-season media mix.

Beyond Ramadan: Year-Round Excellence Across Verticals

TikTok's performance advantage isn't confined to peak seasons. Throughout 2024, the platform delivered superior results across the key verticals shaping Türkiye's app landscape:

How to harness the full potential of TikTok to promote your app?

With the help of AI and Smart+

With Smart+, your app conversion campaigns go further in ROI, ROE, and ROC—respectively, returns on investment, effort, and creative. Our AI-powered performance solution was designed to maximize these returns by automating campaign management across segmentation, auction bidding, and creative. The solution can be used in app and in-app conversion ads , and delivers even stronger results than manually configured campaigns.

With AI also in catalogs

It's a more recent development, but Smart+ also works with product catalogs. Campaigns with Smart+ Catalog Ads even perform 78% better than manual campaigns, which advertisers need to set up step by step—from inventory to ad setup.(1) And to get started, all you need is a catalog (of course), plus data connections, creatives, and a measurement strategy to prove they're working.

In our Business Help Center, you'll find a step-by-step guide on how to set up your Smart+ ads with a catalog. But if you're wondering about the catalogs themselves, you might want to check out this other guide in the same Help Center.

With a certain launch strategy for the advertising campaign

Here, everything will depend on your objective in promoting your app.

Do you want to increase installs? Or perhaps conversions from a specific in-app event, such as account creation? Then our recommendation is the Cost Cap strategy. The tip here is to review your historical CPA and use it as a basis for setting a more reasonable bid in the ad auction—without altering the value by more than 10%, especially during the learning phase.

Now, if you want to reach customers with the potential to spend more on your app , the recommendation is to use Value-Based Optimization ( VBO ) and the MinROAS bidding strategy, or Target ROAS (also known as tROAS ). It helps balance costs and generate results in accordance with your CPA and ROAS goals. This strategy is only available for app campaigns with Smart+ – and to get the most out of it, it's worth keeping an eye on the tip below.

With your data connections working well

To fully leverage the solutions listed above, you need signals. Or rather, events, which are the fuel for a performance campaign. Events are actions people take in your app, such as viewing a product page, adding something to their cart, or purchasing. You use these captured events to create new download, customer acquisition, or retargeting campaigns.

Only, unlike on-site conversion-focused campaigns, there's no Pixel to help map events in an app. But there is a solution. Or rather, solutions. Our Mobile Measurement Partners , who act as intermediaries between your app and TikTok, are one of them. But for data connections , we also recommend the App Events SDK . With it, you get a direct, proprietary connection between your app and TikTok to capture user actions and send them directly to Ads Manager.

With this direct communication, you eliminate potential signal loss, identify a wider variety of events, and gain access to advanced features. Our Help Center has more information and a step-by-step guide to getting started integrating the SDK into your app.

With the correct events configured

With solid data connections up and running, the next tip is to define the right events to use in your ad optimization. There are plenty of options—you can target people most likely to subscribe to an email database (Subscribe event), start a trial (StartTrial), request a loan (LoanApply), and many other options that the Events SDK can identify in your app.

But our tip is to keep it simple: instead of creating ad sets for every event mapped to your app, focus on optimizing for Registration, Purchase, or hitting your ROAS goal with Smart+, which we showed above.

Why? Because they're the most popular among advertisers today, and they generate the most data for TikTok's algorithm to learn from. By operating with more information, our platform is able to optimize ad delivery even further for everyone—improving conversion rates (CVR) and lowering campaign cost per action (CPA).

Oh, and if you already have an entire event mapping strategy set up in your app, don't worry: we're not saying you should throw everything out the window and start from scratch. Not at all, actually. The recommendation is to keep everything as is, so you can continue to have a complete view of your user's journey. But before setting up your campaign, you can "centralize" several of your events into one within the Events Manager.

Let's take the middle of the funnel as an example. It's not uncommon for an advertiser to map the Login, Registration, Checkout, and StartTrial events to the same app. But when setting up a campaign, instead of using each of them to create a separate ad set, you can map them all to a single standard event— Registration —and create a single set.